As we move into the next era of American history, we need to reflect on the bizarre sequence of events we've experienced since 2000, and on how we — and not just George W. Bush — handled them.

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There is this thing we do. It's a small thing. It's a formality, at worst an annoyance. We do it every time we buy a computer or a device requiring software. We do it when we download software online, and then when the software is updated. We do it in order to buy things. We do it in order to sell or share things. We do it in order to find dates and to expand the universe of friendship. We do it in order to express ourselves in writing or film or song, and then we do it in order to read and to watch and to listen. It is the act of everyone, and it involves everything. And what it is — what we do — is this: We agree. We agree to the terms and conditions of service. We agree to use a product that is not our own — that is licensed, not sold. We agree to entrust and, if our trust is broken, to forgive. In what might be called the opposite of the moment of truth, we are given a choice, to accept or to decline, and we accept. We are in the habit of assent, and so the world we live in is the world we have helped bring into being. It is the power of our powerlessness. Our virtual signatures are everywhere, and yet we lost track of them long ago and have no idea what liabilities they might entail — what we've given up and to whom we've given it.

On September 11, 2001, The New York Times published a story on a former member of the Weather Underground named Bill Ayers. The story began provocatively enough — " 'I don't regret setting bombs,' Bill Ayers said" — but nobody read it. Indeed, the edition of the Times published that morning might count as the least-read edition in the paper's history. But that doesn't mean the story was forgotten. Seven years later, it gained a new life, as Ayers himself was given back his old one, as an "unrepentant domestic terrorist," and his provocative opening statement acquired the kind of inescapable cultural currency once reserved for pop songs with killer hooks. The Ayers saga was a perfect coda to the Bush Years, except that what's interesting about the Bush Years is once you start trying to decode them — once you start trying to figure out what the hell happened to this country in the eight years George W. Bush was president — you see that the coda was already there, in the kernel. You see that in addition to being years of shock, years of wrenching change and lasting trauma, they were also years of fulfillment.

It was all there from the start. The historical elements that would collaborate in our historical undoing were all in place, within a few months of the morning of September 11, and by the end of 2001 they — and the Bush Years — were already in motion. There was Islamism, of course, whose bloody drumbeat would be heard again in Somalia, and in Bali, and in Madrid, and in Beslan, and in London, and in Amsterdam, and now in Mumbai, not to mention Iraq and Afghanistan. There was the shadowy sense that what ailed our country was its openness, with our vice president, in a September 16 interview, declaring his intention to "work the dark side," and our president, in his September 20 address to Congress, responding to the challenge of jihad with the promise of a long war and "covert operations, secret even in success." There was fear, with Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, saying a week later that people "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." And then there was the giddy and unsettling promise of technological innovation, as represented by the iPod, which made its debut on October 23 and stands in relation to 9/11 approximately as the Beatles' appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show stands in relation to the Kennedy assassination.

Most of all, however, there was financial fragility — the sense that our markets, along with whole industries, were already shaky to the point of collapse. At the end of the first week of trading after the destruction of the Twin Towers, there was a 14 percent decline in the Dow, which at that time was the second worst in history; at the end of the next week, there was a $15 billion federal bailout of the airline industry. There were fears about oil and gas supplies, which the president responded to with demands that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge be opened for drilling, as a matter of national security; there was the requisite article about strapped couples learning to cook at home instead of indulging in restaurants; by the end of the year, there was the climactic bankruptcy of Enron, a company whose deals mystified even its dealmakers, earning it a place in the annals of economic arcana long before the advent of the subprime derivative. As soon as America was attacked, Americans were told that what was really attacked was their freedom; in retrospect, however, it seems clear that the terrorists were aiming at the target that was most vulnerable and exposed — our economy. Our freedom, after all, was not in their power to destroy: It was in ours. So they destroyed the Towers, hoping that by taking down the symbols of America's absolute authority in the world's financial system they could take down the authority itself. It is a tribute to our resilience that it took seven years for the job to be completed, and that even then the final collapse portended by the collapse of One and Two World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, required a historic combination of a man like George W. Bush in the White House and something else, something more ingrained and ineffable, something that we learned along the way.

For many citizens of the United States, the question of what the hell happened over the past eight years has an easy answer: A man who should never have been president, was. We are accustomed to being done in by politicians who aren't who they say they are; in George W. Bush, we learned what damage could be done by a politician who wasn't who he wanted to be. Bush was always presented — always presented himself — as something of a fait accompli as a person. What you saw was what you got — no need to put him on the couch, so don't try. In fact, he always seemed to be acting to satisfy some deep psychic need in himself. The Bush presidency was no less a psychodrama than the Clinton presidency: The difference was that Bush wasn't as needy as Clinton and had his own ideas of Waspy rectitude, so he went it alone. His fall was generally chalked up to his intransigence, to his refusal or inability to change with changing circumstances; in fact, the people of the United States got caught up — entangled, embroiled — in a narrative of personal transformation that happened to be waged instead of told.

The president changed, all right. Compare the Bush who, in his first State of the Union address, evinced something like abashment when he spoke of the limited aims of his presidency — when he listed the blessings of the United States he inherited as "a balanced budget, big surpluses, a military that is second to none, a country at peace with its neighbors," among others — and the Bush who finally disappeared into petulance when, with all those blessings squandered, he ceded the nationalization of the American economy to Henry Paulson and the bully pulpit to Barack Obama.

Indeed, what defined the Bush presidency, what made it unique, was its isolating air of mutual disappointment. His second term began with the providential defeat of his effort to put Wall Street in charge of Social Security, and from then on any news story that referred to a "major victory" for the president, a major triumph, was not referring to an initiative he put forth on behalf of the American people. It was referring to an expansion of his personal power, or what became known as the "unitary power of the executive." This is what he fought for, unstintingly, and this is what he won. And yet if you want an image that captured the consequence of our executive being truly unitary, you could do no better than the speech he gave in September 2005, after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and his presidency — the eerie speech he gave in front of an empty church, against the backdrop of an empty city. He was only one man, and although he expanded the presidency like no one since Franklin Roosevelt and the federal government like no one since Lyndon Johnson, he wound up history's most expansive absence.

It's the isolation of a president who defined his presidency in terms of his own power that makes the question of our relationship to him so difficult to answer, and so rarely asked. To what extent can the American people claim ownership of — or responsibility for — President George W. Bush? What terms and conditions of his service did we agree to? And if his presidency was both personally and historically transformative, were we, the people of the United States, also thereby transformed?

A country at war needs heroes. The United States has been at war for more than seven years, and it's amazing how many people have stepped up — or been put forth — to fulfill that need, and how rarely it's been fulfilled. We can start with the president himself, whose transformation narrative was intended as a heroic one, and who clearly thought he did his pantomime as fighter pilot not just for himself but for his troops and all his people. We can move on to the Republican party, which styled itself as a virtual party of heroes, from Rudy Giuliani (the hero of 9/11) to Paul Bremer (the hero of post-liberation Iraq, stomping around Baghdad in a suit and army boots) to Tom DeLay (the hero of Terri Schiavo's family and religious cult) to Bush again (see DeLay) and thence to Sarah Palin (the hero of the Real America).

And from there we can go to Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, whose heartbreaking heroism came at the cost of the heroic narratives the Bush administration crafted for them. Lynch, of course, was the soldier whose capture by the Mohammedan hordes supposedly came after she defended herself — and, by implication, her American virtues — in a hail of against-all-odds gunfire; Tillman was the soldier who traded in his life as an NFL defensive back for a role in the war on terror, and whose death in the hills of Afghanistan supposedly came after he defended himself and his unit in a hail of against-all-odds gunfire. That neither story turned out to be true can be excused as a foggy consequence of war; that Lynch was the one who had to step up and insist that she never fired a shot and that Tillman's family had to be the ones to step up and establish that he was killed by friendly fire cannot. These Americans became genuine heroes when they exercised their consciences against the narratives that established their heroism. When that happens to a country — when the standard of heroism becomes the stand the heroes take against their "heroism" — you begin to understand why after so many years of war, so very few Americans know the names of their bravest warriors, even their Medal of Honor winners, and how the "war on terror" acquired its damned, damning quotation marks.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. The irony of 9/11 and the wars that followed was that they were supposed to disestablish irony as a reigning sensibility; instead, they wound up exposing us to ironies of the bitterest and darkest and cruelest kind. That is, not McSweeney's — style irony, the irony of bright minds roaming free in increasingly confined spaces; but ironies contrived by the brutal hand of history itself. The ironies of the Bush Years were ironies that exposed the consequences of our assent, guided — missile ironies that were unerringly aimed at point after point of the American creed, which began 2001 as the foundation of our belief and ended 2008 as the scaffolding of our credulity. America does not attack countries that have not attacked us. America does not torture. America takes care of its own. America follows the rule of law. America's laws are built upon the principle of habeas corpus. America's distinction is its system of checks and balances. American democracy is the inspiration of the world, and American capitalism the envy. America is better than that, no matter what "that" might be. These are not political statements; these are articles of faith, and yet in the Bush Years they suffered a political fate, as they became yoked to an administration that endured the irony of being the most image-conscious in American history at the precise historical moment when any control over how images were either promulgated or consumed was completely lost.

The irony wasn't all dark. It wasn't all John Walker Lindh, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Fallujah, Walter Reed, and New Orleans, beyond the Superdome. It wasn't all 800-point drops in the Dow and four-dollar gallons of gasoline. It wasn't all Bush and Cheney. Sometimes it was...well, Bush and Cheney, which is to say that the Bush Years had their share of comic actors, unwitting straight men to their own humiliations. Rummy. Harriet Miers. Alberto Gonzales. Brownie. George Allen, done in by his own comic coinage. The erstwhile heroes, Rudy Giuliani — with his trusty sidekick, Bernie Kerik — and Tom DeLay. The trinity of Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, and Larry Craig. Harry Whittington, whom Cheney shot in the face. Monica Goodling, who wanted to know whether prospective U. S. attorneys were "pro-God." Even Saddam Hussein, whose scalp was deemed worth an unceasing investment in proverbial blood and treasure, got a chance to strut and fret his hour upon the stage — his botched and hideous hanging not a comic turn, exactly, but proof positive that the liberation we visited upon the Iraqis was being simultaneously visited upon us, in the form of video footage taken covertly on cell phones and posted for everyone to see on YouTube. Imagine the sixties if Abraham Zapruder had kept his camera running for the wholething, even the funny stuff, and you get a pretty good idea of what the Bush Years looked like.

The irony, then, was irony of a new kind, an irony of incessant exposure, authored by technology that was at once decentralized and corporatist, democratizing without necessarily being democratic. The technology of distributed digitized information — the Internet — became the primary means by which we freed ourselves from the administration's overarching and overreaching narrative, and at the same time the means by which we were implicated in it.

It was a lesson in convergence: We deplored the administration's violations of our privacy when we found out it had authorized the National Security Agency to engage in domestic wiretapping; at the same time, we gave up more of our privacy to Steve Jobs than we ever did to George Bush as soon as we bought an iPhone. We deplored the administration's use of torture, or "enhanced interrogation," in our name; at the same time, we made torture into its own genre of entertainment, whether on 24 or in the Saw and Hostel movies or even in the pornography of Max Hardcore. We became a torturing nation, both literally and virtually, and there is an argument to be made that we would never have become one without also becoming the other. In any case, the torture kept going on, without us rising up against it; the violations of privacy kept going on, without us rising up against them; and it became clear that the same ceaseless current of information that enabled us to understand that our political situation was intolerable also enabled us to tolerate it. The last eight years may have been horrifying, but they weren't horrible, not really, unless you were directly victimized by them. Yes, we invaded Iraq, and on the way to losing more than 4,000 of our own men and women, we unleashed the forces that caused the deaths of at least 150,000 Iraqi civilians. Dig it: 150,000 people. And yet that's not the epitaph of the Bush Years. The epitaph of the Bush Years is that we lost that many people and killed that many people and abandoned that many people to their fates, and yet our most effective opposition to the war — the thing that has finally convinced politicians of both parties that there's no profit in it — is the argument that we have lost interest in it, as though it were the rare bit of reality-television programming that we wanted to stop watching.

We don't, though. We don't stop watching. Reality programming was not invented in the Bush Years, but it kept proliferating until it became the most potent of the literal metaphors available to this nonmetaphorical age. We speak as one in the reality programming we make and watch; the message we broadcast to the world is unified and potent. And it's this: We — Americans — have a price. There is nothing and nobody we won't sell out, whether it's our principles or our children, as was the case with 2007's Kid Nation, in which parents left a group of kids to their own devices in the desert so television viewers could see which ones prevailed. Hell, what wasn't sold on the cheap during the last eight years? What line wasn't crossed? What company was too esteemed to be sold off, what governmental function too sacred to be privatized? The fact is, we don't know. We have no idea. We can't keep track. We don't know who owns us anymore or what the payback is supposed to be, any more than we know exactly how much we owe or how much of us exists on some distant server, as a result of agreements entered into with passwords long forgotten.

This might sound alarmist to the point of paranoia if we didn't see, every day, the confirmation that we are being done in by what we've ignored, what we've denied, or what we've forgotten that we agreed to — the secret world of our own rather gleefully accrued liabilities. Answer, please: Is there any collapse that could possibly surprise us, after the collapses of the last eight years? After the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, the seismic swallowing of the tsunami in 2004, the drowning of New Orleans in 2005, the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, and the collapse of the economy in 2008? If we've learned anything during the Bush Years, it's that we're not safe, and nothing is sacred. But we've also learned that there's no such thing as paranoia — that, if anything, we haven't been paranoid enough, as even the most terrible events turned out to be mere portents of more terrible events to come. We've learned, in other words, learned in our bones, that It Can Get Worse. But the question remains: Can we? Can we get worse? Have we hit bottom yet, as a people? I mean, look to the future: It's not simply that there is such a variety of apocalyptic scenarios looming on the horizon, from the economic to the environmental, from Peak Oil to Peak Water to Peak Food; it's that our Peak Lifestyle is implicated in just about all of them, and we know that our Peak Lifestyle is the one thing we're not going to give up without a fight.

And so give this to global warming: It's another test case. Because over the last eight years — since our president rejected the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001 — what we've done with global warming is what we've done with the war on terror and the war in Iraq and the authorization and outsourcing of torture and the creation of a security state and the creation of an insecurity state, in terms of the marketplace: We've lived with it. We've gotten really good at living with things during the Bush Years, at tolerating the intolerable. And while this may sound like another tip of the hat to the incredible resilience of the American people, it's not: Resilience, after all, is not what's required in crisis when the crisis is partly of your own making. Responsibility is. We have heard of the Tech Bubble of the Clinton Years, the Housing Bubble of George W. Bush. Well, the bubble that we're living in now — still — is the bubble that's all our own. It's the Moral Bubble, and it will not be pricked until we take responsibility not just for the forty-third president's actions but for our inaction — for all the agreements we've made without awareness, for all the awareness we've come to without vigilance, for all the times we've touched the easy, insulating button of our assent.

There's this thing we do. It's a big thing, or it's supposed to be. We do it every four years, and this year it seemed as important as our schoolteachers told us it was. It was a test of our assent, which used to be our birthright as Americans — the Whitmanesque "Yes" we shouted to the world — and now seemed like the signature on some damning document we didn't read and don't even have access to. Ask people what the hell happened over the last eight years and the matter of assent — of belief — inevitably turns up somewhere in their answer: "We believed." Ask them what they believed in, however, and the question becomes much more difficult. Did they believe in George W. Bush? No, not really — he just wasn't that kind of man, despite his public efforts to make himself into that kind of man. And so what he relied on, instead, was an apparatus of belief, which required only a passive consensus. We believed, after being told that we had to believe. We believed, after being told that if we didn't, we would die.

Now we were being asked to believe again, in a much more personal way — not only in a man, but a man who might prove to the world that even after the Bush Years we are the exceptional people we say we are; who might be the hero we've been waiting for; who might help us transcend our history and ourselves. Of course, we've learned something about American exceptionalism in the past eight years — that it's the ingredient for American equivalence — and we've learned something about waiting for heroes as well. And yet what choice do we have? We're Americans. We can't vote against assent; we can't vote against assent because the guy we're assenting to once knew the guy who appeared in The New York Times on September 11, 2001, in an edition of the paper we knew enough then not to read, because there were more important things to do. The kernel is in the coda, and the coda is there, right in front of us. So we do it. We click the button; we agree to the terms and conditions of Barack Obama's service, hoping for a reprieve from the last eight years of fine print.